…..If in speaking to minorities we have to weigh every word in advance in case inadvertently we give offence, how can we be at ease with each other, how celebrate our common humanity, our shared anxieties and aspirations, both for ourselves and for those whom we love?" It would be "unfortunate" if the police became "enamoured" of political correctness, which she described as "a pernicious if risible authoritarian attempt at linguistic and social control.

…..The Children of Men

…..I am fifty years old and I have never known what it is to love. I can write those words, know them to be true, but feel only the regret that a tone-deaf man must feel because he can't appreciate music, a regret less keen because it is for something never known, not for something lost.

…..Without the hope of posterity, for our race if not for ourselves, without the assurance that we being dead yet live, all pleasures of the mind and senses sometimes seem to me no more than pathetic and crumbling defences shored up against our ruin.

…..Man is diminished if he lives without knowledge of his past; without hope of a future he becomes a beast.